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Fiction, Facts & Myths about VoIP for Businesses

Who hasn't heard that the benefits that come along with business VoIP are diverse and practically countless? Certainly those who have already adopted the technology are quick to point those advantages out. Following are some of the misconceptions, fictions, facts and myths about Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) services for businesses and companies.

Yet at the same time, if you dig a little deeper, it's almost as easy to find detractors of the technology. They say that the technology's future is shrouded in myth; that there is too much marketing hype and too many unrealistic expectations about it.

Yet clearly the future of business communications lies with VoIP. If it didn't there weren't be so many VoIP providers, so many obvious advantages to the technology, and so many enterprises moving to take part in it.

So which is it? You can't have it both ways. To that end, let's work on debunking some common myths about VoIP that hinder its adoption.

The VoIP Myth of Security

True, VoIP is less secure than traditional isolated copper wires, simply due to the fact that when your data is connected to the Internet, it is arguably also connected to all other things on the Internet.

Yet at the same time, don't we feel comfortable doing our banking online? Don't we pay for merchandise with our credit cards over the Internet? Don't we send other people mission critical information over unsecured, unencrypted email?

What makes Voice any different, or any less secure than that? And if VoIP information is simply data, what makes voice any less capable of being encrypted and secured?

Quite a few of the VoIP myths are carryovers from the nascent days of the technology. Somehow people seemed to think, for instance, that since VoIP started with poor quality, that it would keep that poor quality forever.

Not true. Now, many years after the technology was first developed, it has matured quite a bit. The bugs have been ironed out and its quality is now top-notch.

One of the major reasons VoIP has improved so much is because the Internet itself is capable of supporting more traffic than it was then. It's quite true that there was a significant amount of data congestion in the early days of the Internet.

Data is flowing much more freely now, at broadband speeds everywhere, as opposed to the dialup speeds that were much more common when VoIP was first being developed. Back then, the infrastructure of the Internet was not nearly as robust; in order to have good VoIP you need to have a certain amount of bandwidth available, and in those early days, that resource simply wasn't as common as it is today.

The VoIP Myth of Savings

Sure, many VoIP providers offer completely free calls within their network. If that's not how this myth got started, then I'm not sure how it did, then, because somehow some people got the idea that it was only VoIP-to-VoIP calls that offered the real savings. Furthermore, they thought that calls placed from a VoIP network to a PSTN network would incur a surcharge of some sort.

All of this is simply untrue. VoIP costs are consistently much lower than PSTN, and the savings much greater no matter what networks are being used.

The VoIP Myth of Safety

Initially it was thought that since VoIP was data sent over the Internet, it would not be tied to a physical location, as PSTN calls were. Therefore, any 911 calls wouldn't go to the proper response teams.

Gratefully, this idea was quickly made untrue by the FCC's Federal mandate. Now there are solutions in place to make sure that when there's an emergency, there's an appropriate response.

The most commonly seen answer to this issue is known as E-911. With this solution, there is a third party service provider in place which collects information about any given caller, and routes their calls to where they need to go. If an emergency call is placed, they will then forward the call and all salient data to the correct provider of regional emergency services.